McMenamins, Portland Mercury, X-Ray and doPDX proudly present Sabertooth 2024. With its roots in Portland's Crystal Ballroom's psychedelic history, Sabertooth comes to both the Crystal Ballroom and Spanish Ballroom for two nights of psychedelic stoner rock and beer crafted specially for the event.
Visit the Sabertooth website for all info!
There's long been a growl festering in the West, an earthen rumble fed by tectonic tension, acrid smoke, and sun-parched air. The brew has boiled over lately, a pressure-cooked chaos that can no longer be contained. The growl has grown to a howl.. the howl is at the door. Few are as ready to meet the madness head on as Frankie and the Witch Fingers. On their new album, Data Doom, the band hurtles the listener head first into the wood-chipper of technological dystopia, systemic rot, creeping fascism, the military-industrial profit mill, and a near-constant erosion of humanity that peels away the soul bit by bit. With a fuse lit by these modern-day monstrosities the band seeks to find salvation through a thousand watt wake-up of rock n' roll exfoliation.
After tearing through the tender heart of the Midwest, Frankie and the Witch Fingers found themselves clamped down on the fried edges of Los Angeles, carving out a niche that's equal
parts molten tar pit teardown and cataclysmic careen. Following releases on Hypnotic Bridge, Let's Pretend, and Permanent, the band landed between the twin barbs of Greenway and The
Reverberation Appreciation Society, a perfect fit for their frenetic blend of rhythmic whiplash and sonic soul shake. Anchored by songwriters Dylan Sizemore and Josh Menashe, the band has kept a rotating door of friends and collaborators moving through their midst over the past few years, coalescing post-pandemic into a symbiotic stage beast that's become the beating heart of their new album, Data Doom. Bassist Nikki "Pickle" Smith and drummer Nick Aguilar have been road-hardened and readied over the last year, laying the groundwork for the new record's 300 pounds of pummel and propulsion.
That heft was hurtled onto tape in the band's Vernon, CA studio space. The locale let the city's grit creep into the crevices of their new record, a wild swing at the sternum that hits the listener like an adrenaline shot to the heart. Wiping away the haze of stoned-ape psychedelics that permeated their opus Monsters Eating People Eating Monsters... the band favors an asphalt assault of rock, riff, and amphetamine rhythm. As they've wound out of the last phase, their sound, over a series of singles, has begun to thicken and throb. It's coalesced into a darker strain that ingests the explosive impulses of gas-crisis-era proto-punk, the rhythmic insistence of 70's German Progressives, and the elasticity of funk fusionists alike. They've welded their arsenal of influences to a chassis of nail-bitten bombast that drives Data Doom into the midst of the maelstrom.
The band has shared bills with Kikagaku Moyo, Ty Segall, Oh Sees, Cheap Trick, and ZZ Top, churning their stage-side scorch into household recognition - burning through a barrage of multicolored vinyl pressings and sparring with indie heavyweights for Billboard chart positions. Data Doom looks to cement that status, a sinewy slab cut on the stone of social collapse and
licking the blade in anticipation of what's to come. "Never name the darkness itself," intones Sizemore, but the darkness is already here, embedded in every moment, inextricable from the
capital, sabbatical, sustenance, and solace of the modern age. Data Doom is the elixir and the exorcism, it's the reformation rendered in rock 'n roll.
The rock canon has many anti-heroes, Black Mountain being the latest. In the past, Can's 'Tago Mago' established that the only rule in rock and roll is that there are no rules. Pink Floyd's prodigious output in the 70s showed us that architecture can be cool, while unskilled laborers Black Sabbath demonstrated you can make a lot from not that much. Now Black Mountain teach us that you don't have to be afraid of the past to move bravely into the future, defining what it is to be a classic rock band in the new millennium.
LA mystic-rock mainstay Death Valley Girls return with the announcement of their upcoming LP, Islands In The Sky, out February 24th via Suicide Squeeze Records. With the announce comes cosmic lead-single "What Are The Odds" accompanied by a video of the band reincarnated in red beehive wigs at an epic pool party, quickly expanding into an exploration of existing in parallel universes and multidimensional space/time.
About the track, lead-member Bonnie Bloomgarden offers: "When we wrote "I'm a Man Too" we were trying to revisit No Doubt's "I'm Just a Girl" but through a new lens. "What Are the Odds" is in the same way an investigation /revisitation of Madonna's "Material Girl" but with a DVG spin. We love to think about consciousness, and existence, and we very much believe in some type of reincarnation, but also that this experience isn't linear, there isn't a past and future, there's something else going on! What is it? Is it a simulation, are we simulated girls??!"
For the better part of a decade, LA's scrappy rock n' roll mystics Death Valley Girls have used their music as a means of tapping into a communal cosmic energy. On albums like Glow In The Dark (2016), Darkness Rains (2018), and Under the Spell of Joy (2020) the band challenged the soul-crushing banality of modern society and celebrated "true magical infinite potential" through a collage of scorching proto-punk riffs, earworm melodies, far-out lyrics, and lysergic auxiliary instrumentation. But on their latest album Islands in the Sky, Death Valley Girls' songwriting mastermind Bonnie Bloomgarden uses the band's anthemic revelries as a guidebook to spiritual healing and a roadmap for future incarnations of the self. And while these may be the loftiest aims of Death Valley Girls to date, the resulting music is also by far their most infectious and celebratory.
The seeds for Islands in the Sky were planted while Bloomgarden was bed-ridden with a mysterious illness from November 2020 to March 2021. "When I was sick I had to sleep most of the day. I kept waking up every few hours with an intense message to take care of the island, feed the island...I have no idea why, but making music for the island kept coming up."
